TV

Our Sites

Twitter Creates 3D Maps of Cities Based on Tweets

Twitter has created a series of interactive 3D maps that visualize the connection between the digital network that contains tweets and the physical world from which they were made. Using the Billion Strokes dataset, which includes all geotagged tweets since 2009, Twitter has envisioned San Francisco, New York, and Istanbul according to amounts of social media output.

The company's data visualization scientist Nicolas Belmonte was in charge of the project, as he created maps that can be viewed under eight different options: Heat, Fill, Watermark, Clear, Contour, Terrain, Grid, Dark. Viewers can also decide to view elevation differences in low, medium, or high, for a more or less precise look into the social media activity happening at various locations. While a traditional reading of the map may confuse the cities as being highly mountainous, from a Twitter perspective, the highest peaks mark the most tweets.

Play around with Twitter's interactive Andes maps on their GitHub page.